No Such Thing As A Fish - 386: No Such Thing As Enough Bathtubs

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss flying urine, sinking floaters, Keaton and Kazakhstan.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everybody, Andy here just with a quick exciting announcement before this week's episode of Fish Begins which is that we are going on tour. If you haven't seen this already we are heading around the entire UK and Ireland with our tour Nerd Immunity. It's going to be so much fun, we're going to be stopping off all over the place. Think of a town near you, we're probably playing it. Names to stir the imagination, chill the blood. Things like Peterborough, Barnstable, Chesterfield, Birmingham, Ipswich, Canterbury, we're doing
Starting point is 00:00:32 a whole raft in Scotland, we're doing Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen, we're going to Cardiff, we're going to Belfast and Dublin, we're playing the London Palladium itself. We cannot wait, every single show we're going to be doing a brand new podcast in the second half and there will as always be a first half stuffed with stupidity, facts, us teasing down about the Mongolian death worm, you name it, it's going to be in the show. We cannot wait to be out there and we really hope to see you there. We know that it may feel strange being in a theatre, a room with actual other people, but we cannot wait and we're looking forward to it.
Starting point is 00:01:07 So if you would like to come and see Nerd Immunity all you have to do is go to qi.com slash fish events, see which is the nearest to you and snap up your ticket now. Alright, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Streiber, I am sitting at a great distance from Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting point is 00:01:59 Starting with fact number one, that is Andy. My fact is that for the 1921 Buster Keaton film The Boat, two prop boats were built, one designed to float and one designed to sink. Unfortunately, the one meant to float persistently sank and the one designed to sink repeatedly stayed afloat. Okay, I have a question, why didn't they just relabel them? You know what, you would have been much use on this film, James, absolutely. It's so weird, it's such a weird story.
Starting point is 00:02:26 This is from a book called Buster Keaton's Silent Shorts. The film is The Boat, there was a boat in it called Damn Fino and the movie's technical director was a guy called Fred Gabburi and he built two boats and there were different shots to be filmed basically and yeah, the one which was designed to sink, refused to sink, it had several holes bored into it, it had a broken stern, deliberately broken stern and 1600 pounds of dead iron weight in it, it just would not sink, stayed afloat and the floater on the other hand just repeatedly sank and it had to be stuffed with pumps all the way through the bottom of it to keep it afloat.
Starting point is 00:02:58 Has anyone seen The Boat? I haven't actually, Anna has. Yes, I have and it's dated. I will say it's dated. Really? Okay. But it's perfectly good. I do think that it's probably pronounced Damn Fino, the boat, although obviously you
Starting point is 00:03:11 don't hear them say it, but there is. Did they rhyme it with Rhino halfway through the film in a note? Is that how you know? It's really similar. At one point when they're sinking and they're about to drown, they call the Coast Guard and they say, I'm on this boat and the Coast Guard says, what's it called? And they say, Damn Fino and the Coast Guard mishears it as Damn Defino and it's a hilarious exchange of missing stands.
Starting point is 00:03:36 Very good. So back then that would have killed just because misunderstandings have been ploughed to death in comedy since. You've got to put yourself a hundred years back and go, wow, that's the first misunderstanding that's ever happened. Do you remember that ever where I think it's for a beer? It's the sailors radioing into a coastal station or something and they're saying, help, help, we're sinking, we're sinking and it's a German guy on the receiving end and he says, listen
Starting point is 00:03:59 to this, we're sinking, we're sinking and he says, yes, what are you thinking about? No, that's a good joke. That's a classic. So he's about how you deliver it, I'm just not sure they nailed the delivery in this. In the silent comedy. I watched another movie this week, which was The General, which is one of his big ones. Although at the time it got very bad reviews because it's a movie where he plays someone in the South during the Civil War and all the reviewers were from the North and they
Starting point is 00:04:29 thought that he was kind of giving some kind of skewed version of history where actually the people who were in the South were heroes who were kind of a little bit misunderstood and maybe they should have won the war after all and stuff like that. But actually Buster Keaton, he was part of this kind of weird, I would say conspiracy, but there was almost like a cult of people believing that the South was badly done to in the Civil War. The story sounds really cool of The General because it's based on a true Civil War story and the idea was there were Unionist spies in the South and they decided to basically
Starting point is 00:05:01 hijack a train and the idea was they hijack a Southern train and they take over it and then they speed it along towards Chattanooga, which I like even though the Chattanooga choo-choo is totally unrelated to this train by coincidence, speed it towards Chattanooga and it's like a reverse Wallace and Gromit because they're tearing up the rail and all the telegraph positive stuff behind it. Every scene you look at it and you think this could be Wallace and Gromit. Yeah, it is amazing. Because the scene, one of Buster Keaton's most famous stunts is where there's a huge
Starting point is 00:05:32 sleeper lying across the track, a huge log of wood basically and he's holding a huge sleeper in his hands. He's sitting on the cowcatcher at the front of the train and he has to throw a sleeper which is like tossing the caber basically at the other sleeper to knock it off the track. It's a real shot. The train is actually moving. Yeah, it's beautiful. And he manages it.
Starting point is 00:05:51 Honestly, I watched it this week. It was made in 1927 and I didn't know it was going to happen and I just went, whoa. It's incredible. That's the thing, like Buster Keaton. So he was part of that big movement of silent comedy that came out with Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. But this is a guy who, born in 1895, basically from the get-go, literally from birth, was into physical comedy because he basically did, I mean his parents were both in Vorderville
Starting point is 00:06:20 and he was on the side of the stage every single night, jumping in on their act. And he used to go on stage and his parents just used to throw him across the stage. So he was known as the human mop or Mr. Black and Blue or the little boy who can't be damaged. People would be so concerned. It sounds like a misery memoir title, the little boy who can't be damaged, it really does. But in those days, it was entertainment. Well, there was a lot of questions about the fact of whether or not there was abuse
Starting point is 00:06:44 from his dad as a result of this. He always claimed there never was, but a lot of people said, yeah, but come on, you were chucking your son around the stage. But he went on stage at the age of one day old. Yeah, well, you both say, yeah, that was a story. There were lots of stories that they kind of put across because they were a mother and father and child sort of group of three. And there are lots of amazing stories about things that happened in their early days.
Starting point is 00:07:08 I know the one that you're thinking of. Well, yeah, one, for instance, where he caught his forefinger in a clothes ringer, lost the first joint, then gashed his head near the eye with a brick that boomeranged after he threw it on a peach tree. And then on the same day, he was sucked out of an upstairs window by a passing cyclone that carried him through the air and deposited him in the middle of the street a few blocks away. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:31 And that was supposedly the story for why he started going on stage. It's mostly. And that's all one day, isn't it? That's all one day. It's in it. I've got his autobiography here. It's called My Wonderful World of Slapstick and that is an entry in it. He said, I had rolled and revolved about a block from the farmhouse when a man saw me,
Starting point is 00:07:45 rushed out, scooped me up and carried me to safety of the nearest stormseller, a pretty strenuous day, as anyone will admit, but superb conditioning for my career as the human mop. So my question is, when you read that in someone's autobiography, do you think, well, it's in the autobiography, so it must be true, or do you think maybe the rest of the stuff in this autobiography isn't true? True. I believe it's all true. No, I think it was 20 months old.
Starting point is 00:08:07 Yeah. At that point, we should say. No, exactly. I think it includes in this book that he was named Buster after he fell down a staircase and Harry Houdini, who was in a partnership with his family, saw that and said, you know, they named him Buster, basically, off the back of that. There's so much literature to say that that wasn't the case. I love the dates work out.
Starting point is 00:08:26 Yeah. The dates work out. They were in a show with Houdini. Oh, they definitely were in a show with Houdini and the thing is, is that he knew Houdini as he was growing up. There's stories in this book of him hanging out with him and going to shops and stuff when he was a bit older and when they could converse. So, you know, he claims it's true, but there was a newspaper report that claimed it was
Starting point is 00:08:42 a guy called George Purdy and that was published, you know, in Buster's early life and so it predates it. And that's from his dad giving the story. If you've been in showbiz your whole life, then you're going to have a few little stories about you, aren't you? Exactly. What's amazing is it turns out from reading this book that Buster Keaton is the Brian Blessed of American Hollywood.
Starting point is 00:09:01 Every story is just unbelievable. I think that it looks like the best biography of him is by a woman called Marion Mead, who mainly I love it because I love her. She did a biography of Dorothy Parker that's amazing, but she had a lovely line which was something like he layered the stories upon the myths of his life like layers of a lasagna or something. But she did look into his life and looked into the stuff that happened at his early age and it was very violent.
Starting point is 00:09:25 So she said by age two his brushes with death had included near incineration, suffocation, fools, mutilation and natural calamities. And there was one time when his parents kept him in a suitcase backstage and at one point a stagehand walked by, thought someone's left that suitcase open, shot it and they came out at the end of the night and found that he had almost suffocated, but he was fine. And then that suitcase kind of came in useful afterwards, didn't it, because they took the handle and they put it on his back, attached it to his clothes and they would hold on to the suitcase handle and throw him across the stage.
Starting point is 00:09:59 They used to just, like there's stunts, they'd throw him across the stage, they used to drop him into the orchestra pit when he was like two onto a bass drum, like his dad once apparently threw him at a heckler. We're thinking about doing that to you on the next live tour, we all get together. But then the father would get arrested according to Buster Keaton, he said they would get arrested every other week or rather his old man would get arrested and the police would basically come over and say, why are you abusing your son? And then they would kind of look at Buster Keaton and see if he had all bruises and stuff
Starting point is 00:10:33 and he didn't apparently because he could fall so well and so they kind of let them off every time. It was, it's weird when you read about him because you find yourself on the side of Buster Keaton against the first ever child protective agency because, and you wonder if you're reading it right, it was the Jerry Society, it was the first ever you know protection of children organization in the world, it had just been set up and it was chasing down these people who it did seem like were abusing their son, but he remembers them as complete bogeymen.
Starting point is 00:11:01 Wow. And the thing about them that's kind of interesting is they were set up by Elbridge Jerry, who was the grandson of Vice President Elbridge Jerry, from where we get the word. Jerry Mandarin. Jerry Mandarin. Really? Yeah, he's the guy who first fingered around with the districts. Oh, sorry.
Starting point is 00:11:18 I was about to ask what that means but I understand now. How rude. It's where they change the shape of the districts to mean that your voters are in a place where you want them to be. But another interesting thing about the Jerry Society is that they were started when there was a church worker called Etta Agnalwila and she'd noticed that a child was being mistreated and she wanted to try and get someone to help this child but there was no one to help them and she realized that there was no charity that was there to look after children.
Starting point is 00:11:48 But there was an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and she's like, how can we have a charity for cruelty to animals but not cruelty to children? And so she went to the person who was in charge of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and said, why don't you set up a children's charity and that's what they did. So actually, the children's charity grew from the animals charity. Really? I thought you were going to say they reclassified children as animals for the benefit of the
Starting point is 00:12:16 protection. You know the really famous, I mean the really, really, really famous stunt is where the house falls on him, around him and there's a window which falls exactly in the right place that it lands around him. He had two inches of clear on either side of him for that stunt. It's just incredible. I can't believe they made it work. And he supposedly was nailed to the ground.
Starting point is 00:12:37 I can't quite believe that. He was nailed to the ground. His shoes were nailed to the ground to keep him exactly on the right mark so that's where the window is going to fall. I watched that scene yesterday and I'm sure he walked away. The shot changes. I believe the shot changes and then he leaves. But maybe, I mean, possibly it doesn't that I'm wrong.
Starting point is 00:12:54 Yeah. No, I think you would go with nailing to the ground because you can't look up and check because otherwise that ruins the scene. But I wouldn't want to be nailed to the ground if they're going to drop the house as in you might think... Once it hits you, there's not much you can do about it. Yeah, that's true. Surely you'd want to be nailed to the ground rather than risk getting your boots on and
Starting point is 00:13:10 then thinking, oh god, did I just accidentally step to the left of it? Yeah, exactly. So, he was very, very successful for a very long time, had a lot of money and he used to invest in real estate and so on. One of the things he invested in was a yacht and he was very proud of this yacht and one day he was going through troubles in his marriage. He went to take his yacht out and he tried to sink it to end it all, but unfortunately he was using the damn fino.
Starting point is 00:13:39 No, he went to try and take the yacht out and the sort of boat master or the person who sort of looks after it said, I'm sorry, you can't, it's only your wife who can take it out and she's told me not to let you. And he suddenly discovered that their marriage had fallen apart and they were getting basically a divorce. So, he lost his yacht. So, in retaliation, he bought himself what he called the land yacht. Do you guys read about the land yacht?
Starting point is 00:14:02 No. I read a one-line reference to it, but I didn't find it anymore. Yeah, yeah. So, I read into it. He bought a land yacht, which basically he dressed as a captain and he used to drive around and he would go to all sorts of, like he would go to hotels and he'd make a scene of it by saying, we're going to rent out a room, but actually we're just going to rent out a car park space and we'll stay in our land yacht.
Starting point is 00:14:21 Is it like a big sort of vehicle that looks like a yacht? Yeah, it's basically a big bus that had been converted into what was known as a land yacht. It does sound awesome on one level, but on the other, he is after divorce sleeping in his car. There are two ways of looking at the situation. He did say, I had as much fun with my land yacht as a man can whose purpose is to forget his whole private world has fallen apart. So, yeah, it was not a good time for him.
Starting point is 00:14:46 But then he ended up in a sanitarium, didn't he? Yeah. And he was in a straight jacket, but unfortunately, it's very hard to keep someone in a straight jacket if they're friends with Harry Houdini, so he just got him straight out. Yeah. Was he really in a straight jacket? Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:01 And the Harry Houdini thing is, I think, falls into the, of course, the Buster Keaton and the tornado. Yeah. The great tales. But he ran away, didn't he, and he got married to the nurse who was looking after him at the time. While he was still married to the original life. Yes.
Starting point is 00:15:14 Really? Yeah. I mean, he was very drunk all the way through this time. Well, that's fair enough then. He might have said, that was very big of me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:24 That'll be another one of those mishearing jokes. That would have worked brilliantly on a silent film. And his later years, he mostly did TV adverts, and his grandchildren didn't know him from any of his films. They knew him as the singing puppet advertising Alka Selzer on TV. Really? Yeah. Wow.
Starting point is 00:15:41 But he loved it. He would turn up and do the adverts and then go away again. And other silent stars like Charlie Chaplin, I don't think, did Telly. They thought it was beneath them. They hated Telly. Yeah. Yeah. So he did Limelight, which is one of the great silent comedy scenes, because it's in the
Starting point is 00:15:53 talkies at this point, and it's two old men, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, coming together to do a routine on a vaudeville stage. And it's just such a beautiful moment, because Buster Keaton still wasn't making movies. And Chaplin gave him this moment again to sort of shine, which was really, really wonderful. Because Chaplin, I think, also felt like all of those silent stars, they sort of became much less famous very, very quickly during the talkies and then had his big renaissance. So he did get Buster Keaton to have a slightly happy ending. He got an honorary Oscar in the late fifties, I think.
Starting point is 00:16:23 And all of his films were re-shown in the fifties and sixties and film buffs were suddenly like, this is genius. And Chaplin as well got, I think he was put up for an honorary Oscar in seventies and the early seventies. Yeah. And when he was told about that, he said, God, does anyone even remember who I am? Wow. Well, because he'd been exiled to Sweden or somewhere like that.
Starting point is 00:16:40 Exiled. Yeah. He got kicked out of America. Chaplin had a huge period for... What for? Being a commie. Yeah, communist. You're kidding.
Starting point is 00:16:48 Yeah, yeah. I think he left on a holiday and was told he couldn't come back. Wait, what's black and white and red all over? Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin. Very good. I can't find that. That's great.
Starting point is 00:16:58 Stop the broadcast. That's a clue to who's sponsoring us this week. It's Russia. We're sponsored by Russia. No, we're not really. We are sponsored this week by Babel. Yes. Indeed.
Starting point is 00:17:18 Babel are the amazing language learning company that can teach you all the words you need to know in Spanish, in French, in Italian, in German, in another eight languages, including Russian. That's right. It's so much fun learning a language. You feel like you have another entire identity when you do. And a lot of us learn languages in school and we may not have thrived or enjoyed it at the time, but now if you travel, when you get to travel, it's so much fun to try the
Starting point is 00:17:47 local language and express yourself in there and learn all the weird quirks. Babel is the perfect way to do it. They have 15 minute lessons. You can learn it on the go. It's practical. It's built with real world conversations in mind. Yeah. It's a really, really good app.
Starting point is 00:17:59 I do use it myself. And I think, Andy, you've used it to brush up on your German. Yeah. Das ist gar. Das ist gar? Well, I think I might have said that as a garfish. The point is that I'm near the beginning of that journey. You can start your journey by going to babel.com.
Starting point is 00:18:15 That's B-A-B-B-E-L.com forward slash play. If you go there and use the promo code FISH, then you can get six months free with a purchase of a six month subscription. Ja, nur geradeaus nehmen Sie die erste Straße links und du bist am Babel. B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash play und enter in Sie die offer code FISH and you'll get an extra six months free. That was genuinely really, really impressive. Prudelscheite podcast.
Starting point is 00:18:46 Auf mit dem Podcast. Auf mit dem. No, never mind. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 1993, America learned that Kazakhstan had enough uranium to make 24 nuclear bombs when a US diplomat's car mechanic tried to sell it all to him. Oh, my God. It's very cool.
Starting point is 00:19:15 It's like, you know, you get your car done and they're always like, what do you want, your wheel trims doing? Or do you want this doing? It's upselling. Yeah, it's major upselling. And he bought it as well. So this was a guy called Andy Weber, and he was sort of in charge of defence and nuclear programmes under Obama, but in the 80s he was working at the US Embassy in Kazakhstan
Starting point is 00:19:36 and his car mechanic, who was also kind of a fixer and all-round wheeler dealer kind of guy, basically said to him, too fancy some uranium. And so this guy called the US government and said, look, this bloke's just offered me a bunch of uranium and they didn't believe him. But eventually he had a series of meetings and was set up with other people to lead him to the uranium. And he met with this general, this Kazakh general, who just slipped him a bit of paper which said, U-235, as in the uranium that can make a nuclear bomb, 90% 600 kilos.
Starting point is 00:20:10 So for comparison, the Hiroshima bomb used 64 kilos of 80% in rich uranium. OK. It was hardcore stuff. And so what did he do with this uranium when he bought it? Well, it just kept in his back pocket, useful for a rainy day. No, he, he told the US government and they chatted to the President of Kazakhstan and they agreed that the US should take it in case Iran got it, basically. Same old fears.
Starting point is 00:20:33 And so he was taken to it and shown it and it sounds incredible. He went to this warehouse, basically, and he found it all in buckets and the buckets were spaced apart. So they were on this big table and they were spaced apart because if you have uranium too close together when it's that highly enriched, it does create a massive nuclear explosion. So it literally spaced apart to avoid criticality issues. Oh my God. Isn't that terrifying?
Starting point is 00:20:55 What if you've got a small table? It was, he did specify it was a very big table. Must have been a very big table, 600 kilos in buckets. Yeah, it's quite heavy, I think. Maybe they had a few trussle tables, that kind of thing. They probably set up some, yeah, trussle tables. Yeah, pushed them together. The extraction process was pretty amazing.
Starting point is 00:21:12 You had to carry it in a really large plane. So it was some of the largest planes in the world that were sent over from America to Kazakhstan to pick it up. There was this tiny... Is that because it has to be kept at a certain distance from itself? I think it has to be kept at a distance. Yeah, and I think there are actually four planes. It's a big table.
Starting point is 00:21:26 Wow. Now you can now turn down your in-flight tables. Why not just take them in separate, like do a bunch of trips? Well obviously, more likely of problems if you take them on loads of flights. If you take them on one flight, hopefully nothing goes wrong. It's like that old saying, put all your eggs in one basket. Yeah. There was four baskets.
Starting point is 00:21:47 It was all uranium and it was four baskets, slash planes. And then they weren't allowed to fly over any countries, because basically they're carrying this massive nuclear bomb. I think Kazakhstan is landlocked. So yeah, they had to get to the nearest sea possible. So they had to literally jump from like Caspian Sea over hardly any land. And because of that, it ended up being the longest flight ever that the US had done. And they had to do loads of in-flight refuelling,
Starting point is 00:22:13 because obviously they didn't have enough fuel to do this massively long flight. So they were taking such a roundabout route. What about for four planes? For four planes, yeah. What a nightmare. Yeah, hell. That's a nightmare situation. You wouldn't want to be project manager on that, obviously.
Starting point is 00:22:29 Obviously. It's not a very can-do attitude that Andy, I don't think. What you really need to be doing is, OK, guys, this is what we're going to do now. Oh, God, this sounds hard, doesn't it? It's what I was podcasting and not in nuclear material, that's personal. Have you guys heard about the missing Nazi uranium cubes? This is amazingly cool.
Starting point is 00:22:49 That's like an Indiana Jones fly. It genuinely is. It's amazing. So Berlin was working on nuclear fission in the late 1930s. Lots of people were working on it at the time, obviously, because it would have been a big advantage. And the German scientists made this really weird cube nuclear reactor, which was 664 cubes of uranium all hanging up near each other, I guess, from the kind of reaction that Anna was talking about.
Starting point is 00:23:09 So it was not a proper reactor in the way that we'd understand it, but it was all uranium. And when the Allies invaded, they took the cubes, which the German scientists, as they left, had tried to hide by burying in a field. So the Allies had to dig up these cubes and take them away. And it was a chaotic attempt to get hold of them. So in April 1945, there was a retreating military truck
Starting point is 00:23:29 with the cubes on them and a bunch of boys in a town called Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Oh, yeah. They nicked a load of the cubes and discovered that when you threw them, they would spark when they hit the ground. And so they just were chucking around uranium. You know what? I've been to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Have you?
Starting point is 00:23:43 Yeah, I have. And when we went there, it was Christmas time and there was a big sort of marketplace. Yeah. And there were a load of kids and they had these little cap things and they kept throwing them on the floor genuinely. No way. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:56 That's really, that's bizarre. You probably should have confiscated those. But lots of them are missing now. No, I think I do suspect there is loads of this stuff still lying around. Even though everyone claims weapons, inspectors, blah, blah, blah. They've sorted it out. I mean, there's no way. Hands, blicks, his ears keep running around now.
Starting point is 00:24:16 Get back on it, blicks. What are you doing? In the 90s, there were US inspectors in Russia who were basically saying Russia was full of these warehouses that had little bits of uranium in them. He said there was one warehouse stuffed with very highly enriched uranium and it was locked with a bit of rope and a wax seal, which I've opened wax seals on the occasional fashion letter
Starting point is 00:24:37 and it's not difficult. That's really raising a few more questions than it's answered. Who's sending you wax sealed letters, Emma? I exchanged letters with the past. Are you going out with a count from the 17th century or something? We send wax seal. Do you? Yeah, we do, yeah.
Starting point is 00:24:53 Polina uses wax seal a lot. Really? James and I always correspond that way. That's why we find that when the podcast, he has to write to me. What does she use them for? Just kind of cool, like, cool seal. Well, she just thinks it's cool in Instagrammy. So you have your own, like, harken seal that goes on it.
Starting point is 00:25:09 I can't remember. She has her own seal, but I don't think it's a harken seal. Right. Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, no, I agree with you because it was all paper trail, wasn't it, back then? And we've lost the paper.
Starting point is 00:25:18 We don't know where stuff is. 50% of this podcast use wax seals. That should be the headline fact. It's got to be unproportional. And it's not you. I mean, that's insane. Yeah, but like Dan says, it was kind of paper trails. And they basically relied on, they just had fences.
Starting point is 00:25:38 They had ropes. They might have had the odd wax seal, but mostly it was just intimidation that stopped people from stealing this stuff. It was basically like, with a secret police, you better not steal it because you know what will happen. And that's basically their only kind of way of stopping people from stealing stuff.
Starting point is 00:25:53 But the problem was that if you lost any uranium, you're getting so much trouble, people just kept it off the books. And so that's the reason we don't really know how much of anything there was. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't want to be reporting that back to Stalin, would you?
Starting point is 00:26:08 No, man. Of course not. I've lost a bomb. And Britain, third nuclear power, and you don't hear that much about us, do you? And also in this year, the UK has raised the number of nukes that we have, which didn't get in the news that much,
Starting point is 00:26:23 but we've gone up from the previous cap of 225, our cap is now 260. So in a world where like ostensibly, at least, we're saying, let's get rid of all the nuclear weapons, I think there's a lot of re-arming happening around the world at the moment. Wow, that's very interesting. I mean, it doesn't feel like those extra 45
Starting point is 00:26:41 are going to make all the difference in one way or the other. No. Like, if you can think of 220 places to attack and you still want 45 more, I don't know. I mean, it's what your priority is at. Cause what, America and Russia are going to have what, about 6,000 each, 10,000 each, something like that.
Starting point is 00:26:56 So our extra 40. Might make all the difference in that war. 40 more than Australia have. I think, you know, it's not necessarily, you don't have to go fighting the big boys. Well, I think that the idea is not to fight anyone. I think the idea is- Fight, fight, fight.
Starting point is 00:27:13 Please God, no. I think most people think the idea is a deterrent. Yeah, I think welcome to the very confusing Cold War philosophy of mutually assured destruction, which obviously didn't make any sense at all. But yeah, we've got enough to destroy the universe. But 17% of British electricity comes from nuclear sources. So I say, well done.
Starting point is 00:27:31 You know, do you? The positive spin. Yeah, me too. It's not weapons grade though. Not weapons grade. No, no, no, no, no. But Sellefield nuclear power station is obviously one of the places where it's generated.
Starting point is 00:27:43 And Sellefield's a really interesting place. They have their own magazine, which I didn't know. How interesting. How often is that issued? That's not a weekly magazine, is it? It is weekly, but every week, there are half as many pages as in the previous week. But that's not all that Sellefield has, Dan,
Starting point is 00:28:03 because I sense you're being skeptical that that's the most interesting thing. I'm just surprised you opened it. What's coming next? They've got a freezer full of Dead Sea Gulls, which is cool. Because any mammal that dies in Sellefield, that's our mammals. No.
Starting point is 00:28:19 All right. Three seagulls. If animals go into Sellefield and they get too close to the nuclear stuff, then they are considered hazardous, radioactively hazardous. And so that can be a gateway to poison the wider area, because obviously you've got these radioactive seagulls
Starting point is 00:28:36 flying off, creating mayhem. So they're considered putrassant nuclear waste. This was reported in 2010. They had 350 birds and small mammals in their freezers. That's quite a big freezer. Yeah, it is. They'll keep you going in a lockdown. Yep.
Starting point is 00:28:48 That's quite a big freezer, as far as what? That's the most interesting fact about that story. Picture the freezer. You didn't want me to be interested in project management before. No, when I show an interesting freezer, I'm back to page. Just on nuclear bombs and the hazards of them, America seems to be a bit clumsy with those sometime.
Starting point is 00:29:13 We've read a few stories where you think, Jesus, you guys got lucky there, really. So in 1961, there was a plane, and it had a mid-flight situation where all the pilots had to jump out of the plane, evacuate ejector seat out of it, and the plane actually crumbled in the air. And two nuclear bombs dropped from it over North Carolina. And they should have gone off, basically.
Starting point is 00:29:35 But they found one of the bombs hanging from a parachute off a tree. And they looked at it, and basically for this bomb to go off, four things needed to be activated on it. So it's a forward-tier system. Three of those had been activated in the process of it going down, but the fourth didn't go off for some reason. As none of them should have gone off, should they?
Starting point is 00:29:55 And yet, somehow, three of these extreme safety triggers had just gone, yeah, we're ready to go. That's why you have four, I guess. Oh, my god. But if it went off, each of them had 253 times the power that the little boy bomb had that was dropped over Hiroshima. Can you imagine? Just one thing didn't go off.
Starting point is 00:30:14 It's kind of mind-boggling. We had one in Britain as well in the 50s, didn't we, in Lake and Heath air base in Suffolk. That was a plane crashed into a nuclear weapons storage facility. It was a miracle that the bombs didn't explode. But if they had, we probably would have lost Cambridge. Wow.
Starting point is 00:30:32 It was a US official. Noxford Boy, and he's looking happy. No great loss. One US official said it's possible that parts of Eastern England would have become a desert. Wow. We only found out about this way, way later. But when we look back, the reports
Starting point is 00:30:49 said that there was a mass panic when they realized this has happened. And when the fire services were going towards Lake and Heath, all they saw was a convoy of Americans just legging it out. Just cars full of people just panicking and people getting taxis and just saying, take me anywhere away from here as quickly as you can. Would you take on that taxi ride as a cab driver?
Starting point is 00:31:11 I think I'd say, do you know what? You're a little bit out of my zone, actually. I might put a surge charge on for sure. It is just unbelievable nothing ever happened. My god, we got lucky. There's so many cock-ups. In 1983, there was this other one, which was when in the Soviet Union,
Starting point is 00:31:28 there was a computer malfunction, which meant that the guy on duty, Stanislav Petrov, basically received information that the US was launching a missile strike on the USSR at that very moment. And he was under very strict orders that he should tell his superiors, and they would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. And so he watched the siren go off
Starting point is 00:31:46 and go, like, strike, strike, strike. And it said, this is actually 100% reliable information we've got. A second siren, a third, a fourth, a fifth went off. And he, for some reason, decided not to tell his superiors, thought, I do know why. I think that something's gone wrong here. And he said the only reason he kind of thought that
Starting point is 00:32:03 was because the system was too certain. And he thought it had to pass 28 or 29 security levels to be totally sure that there was a strike. And he was like, I'm not even sure it would do that if there was a strike. So he didn't report it. 20 minutes went by. Nothing happened.
Starting point is 00:32:20 So he thought, OK, it was a computer cock up. But he was the only civilian person who was. That's a stressful 20 minutes. Not even the best episode of Frasier could take your mind off that. OK, it's time for fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that frog hopper insects can shoot their urine away from their body
Starting point is 00:32:47 20 times their own body length. If they didn't do that, they'd probably drown in their own piss. Well, good for them that they developed this. Bad for frog hopper toilet makers, I guess. Yeah. 20 times is quite far, though. So quite, is it how?
Starting point is 00:33:05 Yeah, give us more. How would that work? 120 feet for us. Because they must be pissing a hell of a lot for it to stack up enough that it could drown. Well, they all make really, really good points. So this was an article that I read recently on iflscience.com. And it was about frog hoppers.
Starting point is 00:33:23 And what they do is they drink sap from trees. But they drink xylem, whereas most insects drink phloem. So phloem's got loads of sugar, really easy to get to. For some reason, they drink xylem, which is really hard to get to and has very little nutrition. And because it has so little nutrition, they have to drink tons and tons and tons and tons of it. And I don't need to tell you that if you drink lots
Starting point is 00:33:46 and lots of stuff, you need to pee a lot. So they create loads and loads of urine. And really, they piss pretty much all the time. And if they didn't get rid of it somehow, it's gonna get in the throat. If they had a throat, did they have a throat? Let's not discuss whether they have throats on that. Anyway, so what they've come up with
Starting point is 00:34:05 is a bum-mounted catapult. What happens is they can urinate out of their bodies and this catapult fires the liquid away about 10 centimetres away, which might not sound that far, but they're only about five millimetres in length. Okay, so cool. But if you're parked at that exact distance
Starting point is 00:34:25 from another of these frog hoppers, it's effectively a war, isn't it? You're sort of drowning each other in battle. What would you do? Would you move? I guess you'd move. You'd step to the side. Yep, we'll solve that.
Starting point is 00:34:39 And then having to go to all of this effort, I think just because they didn't pay attention in GCSE biology, the xylem carries the water, the phloem carries the sugars. You idiots. Exactly. I mean, why are they doing it?
Starting point is 00:34:50 But the amount of urine that they produce, particularly when they're babies, they're nymphs, they produce between 150 and 280 times their own body weight in urine every single day. Every single day. It's so gross. It's nuts. So I was talking to Ethan, one of the elves about it.
Starting point is 00:35:06 So I weigh roughly 80 kilograms, roughly that. So that would be me producing 22,400 liters of urine a day. That's what they do. So basically 74 bathtubs worth of urine. Wow, is that full baths? Full baths, yeah. Gosh. 74 bathtubs full of urine.
Starting point is 00:35:24 An arresting image. Where do you get that many bathtubs? You'd have to go to a showroom. You'd have to go to John Lewis. They won't be happy about it. They see you coming. Oh no, here's Dan. Here's Pissy Shriver.
Starting point is 00:35:38 Oh, frog coppers. Frog coppers are amazing. They're amazing. Like Hannah said, they're stupid because they suck out xylem, which is really hard to suck out. It's not only got no nutrition, it's really hard to suck out.
Starting point is 00:35:51 So it means they have to be really, really good at sucking. Oh yeah. They've got record breaking sucking powers, haven't they? Biggest suckers in nature. I think 80 times more powerful than an elephant sucks, I think. I mean, yeah. They're incredible jumpers as well. Their jumping is extraordinary.
Starting point is 00:36:08 So they can get to the heights of 70 centimeters, and they're only six millimeters long. So that's a huge jump. And what's amazing is that they use their back legs in order to do the jumping, but the back legs are basically specialized to be used for that. So when they're walking around normally,
Starting point is 00:36:24 they're just dragging them along, not being used. They're just sort of coming along, and then as soon as they wanna jump, they cock them into position, and then just fling themselves. That is amazing. They can sometimes ratchet up the strength in their back legs.
Starting point is 00:36:37 So they kind of prepare a jump in advance, and then they don't jump. See what I mean? They have a locking mechanism in their legs, which means they can keep the potential energy high. So they are a coiled spring, and then they just walk around on their front four legs and drag along these heavily loaded back legs with them
Starting point is 00:36:56 so they can make a getaway, I guess. And then they exert massive amounts of G-force on themselves, don't they? When they go flying through the air. So they exert a G-force of over 400 G. That's what they generate when they jump up. And for comparison, an astronaut who goes into orbit gets G-force of about five G.
Starting point is 00:37:13 And so that's a lot. If it was a human, we wouldn't survive. And five G is very bad for you, isn't it? Sorry. Gives you COVID? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been watching a lot of David Ike stuff. So people might know frog hoppers as well as spittle bugs,
Starting point is 00:37:30 another name for them. And that's because if you ever walk out in the countryside in the middle of spring, you might see little bubbles of spit on bits of grass or bits of plants. And that is made by these frog hoppers. And basically they eat all of this xylem stuff into their body, and then they poo it out
Starting point is 00:37:50 into little bubbles. And then those kind of bubbly poos is where their children live. It's a beautiful start in life. Well, they're just lucky to have, you know, the bank of mum and dad, these kids to rely on. But they're sort of suffocated in there. So they've got to like shove a little bit
Starting point is 00:38:07 of their abdomen out to breathe in. Otherwise. It's a snorkel, basically. Yeah, it's a snorkel, basically. Yeah. It's very weird. But then if you kind of scare the little baby as you're going past,
Starting point is 00:38:17 I don't know how you would do it, I guess. Boo! That'll do it. Very easily scared, actually. It'll kind of retreat into its little bubbly foam nest, and it'll stop breathing, and then just hope that the threat goes away, and then it'll come back out again.
Starting point is 00:38:30 Yeah, I think sometimes they can use them as emergency oxygen tanks. So sometimes if you've freed them out, they'll retreat into the bubbles, and they'll pierce a few bubbles. So they bond together into a bigger bubble, and use it as an emergency tank. It's really clever, though.
Starting point is 00:38:43 The cookies bit. It fights predators, because I think it tastes horrible. And it also stops the larvae from drying out. It's come out of their bum, hasn't it? It's come out of their bum, you know? Self-respecting predators is not going to have that. And it stops them from drying out,
Starting point is 00:38:55 but obviously when you then become born, you don't want to be soft anymore. You don't want to be wet. So what do you do? Well, you blow an extra-large bubble inside of your bubble, and so more air comes in there, and then your exoskeleton can dry out, and then you can come out of the spitty bubble,
Starting point is 00:39:14 and you're fine, and you can be an adult. That's such amazing creatures. They really are cool. Why aren't we learning about these all the time? Because also, when you walk around the countryside, I always thought it was sap. In fact, I'm pretty sure my mum once told me it was just sap. And I said, why is there
Starting point is 00:39:27 those globules of saliva sitting on all the plants? My parents always said it was cuckoo spit, which is what it's called, but they never went on to say which is made by an insect. It's possible they hadn't looked into it, and they hoped you wouldn't inquire further. I must just say thank you to Claire Harkin. Not my sister, Claire Harkin,
Starting point is 00:39:47 but another Claire Harkin with the same name, who is one of the experts on frog hoppers in the UK. And you can help her by going to her website, which is spittlebugsurvey.co.uk if you see any cuckoo spit in the spring. And the reason is we need to know where these frog hoppers are because it's possible that they can start spreading disease. There's a bacteria called xylella,
Starting point is 00:40:11 which originated in South America. And when they go into the plant to get this xylem, they also can sometimes put the bacteria into the plant, and it means that the plants can die. They basically die of thirst, really. And if you find this bacteria in a tree, then all the plants within 100 meters will need to be destroyed because it's so catching this thing.
Starting point is 00:40:32 In Italy, basically centuries old, olive groves have had to be kind of wiped out. Oh, is that what caused the massive olive wipeout? Some of them, for sure. Yeah, that was bad. Oh, frog hoppers, not so great after all. It's the bacterium's fold. I guess so, yeah.
Starting point is 00:40:46 So if you do find any cookies fit in your garden, then go to spittlebugsurvey.co.uk and let them know where it is, and then we can test it. And we should say we think the bacteria is not in the UK yet. But so if you find cookies fit in your garden, don't destroy 100 meters around everything. It's just important to report the presence of it so it's known where it is.
Starting point is 00:41:06 I spoke to Claire Harkin and she sent me loads of it. Yeah, loads of the material I've got for this came from her. I said from one Harkin to another, can you send me all of your frog hopper stuff, please? I really hope in the future, all your emails get mixed up between what you're meaning to send to your sister and what you sent to her. I'm just terrified now,
Starting point is 00:41:25 because I remember the last time something horrible came to Italy and we said, but it hasn't come to the UK yet. That went extremely badly. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. We wanted to let you know that this week
Starting point is 00:41:43 we're sponsored by Wondrium. Yes, Wondrium is formally the Great Courses Plus, the go-to place to find all of the most amazing lectures and talks about the world of history, science, environment, pop culture, bizarre, mad as shit theories. Those are the ones I go to. Yeah, it's even got something for Dan, so it's definitely got something for you.
Starting point is 00:42:05 So many interesting courses on there. So if you want to learn about the crimes of the century, for instance, or if you want to learn about Notorious London, really delve into Jack the Ripper, things like that, that's great. I'm currently learning how to be a medieval knight. Are you? Of course, on that, I am.
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Starting point is 00:43:02 Okay, on with the show. On with the show, I haven't really murdered anyone. On with the show. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that the person credited as official consultant about the future for the movie Back to the Future 2
Starting point is 00:43:20 is the great grandson of H.G. Wells. Very nice. Very nice. Author of? Author of. Time machine. Time machine and War of the Worlds and so on, but obviously, time machine, very relevant to the movie.
Starting point is 00:43:33 He's not a sort of future writer, he's not a scientist. He actually works within the movie world, so he's a director. So he's a director of a great childhood favorite movie of mine, An American Tale, Five All Goes West. Yes.
Starting point is 00:43:46 Yeah, he did The Prince of Egypt. He worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he started his career. Kung Fu Panda, he worked on. He worked on. I'm sorry. All the greats. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:43:57 Kung Fu Panda 3. But no, so he's a big Hollywood guy, and he got brought on to Back to the Future 2 because he's a big Hollywood guy. He got brought on to Back to the Future 2, and he did some consulting about the future. What's his name? His name is Simon Wells.
Starting point is 00:44:10 Simon Wells. Yeah. H.E. Wells. Yeah. What an interesting man. Oh my goodness. Incredible futurist and novelist and everything. You know, he wrote so many classic works.
Starting point is 00:44:21 So he wrote War of the Worlds, Time Machine as we've said, The Island of Dr. Moreau, which is an absolute classic. The Invisible Man. I mean, almost all of it was in this really short period quite soon after he became an author. He wrote 40 years.
Starting point is 00:44:34 He wrote dozens and dozens of novels and, you know, hundreds of short stories and all of this. Yeah, he came up with so much cool stuff. He came up with Wikipedia long time before it was made. Yeah. Which is super fun. The World Brain. Yeah, that's a book that he published.
Starting point is 00:44:47 Yes, exactly. In 1936 was a lecture, and in 1936 he presented it as The World Brain, which I think is what we should rename Wikipedia. And his idea was that it was an encyclopedia that was constantly changing and alive and maturing and being revised by Brains from around the world. And he said, you know,
Starting point is 00:45:05 everyone should be able to refer to this for their knowledge of everything, schools and colleges and anyone who needs to fact check anything. And basically the only difference is that it would be delivered in the form of reels of microfilm being dropped on demand from airplanes, as opposed to... We might get there.
Starting point is 00:45:20 We might get there in the future. Fingers crossed. He thought it would prompt world peace, didn't he? Yeah. He thought that if we all had access to the same information, its creation is a way to world peace, his words. And he was saying this in 1936. I think also it depends when you got him
Starting point is 00:45:34 whether you want to take his futurism because in the early 20th century he wrote, Anticipations was at massive bestseller and it was what he thought the future was going to be like and almost kind of what he thought it should be like because he'd read a lot of Darwin and a few other things and he thought this is the way we should go.
Starting point is 00:45:53 And he thought basically half the population should enslave the other half of the population. Oh, whoa! He thought that racial and social homogeneity should be enforced. He thought that certain groups shouldn't be allowed to have children and certain groups should be told
Starting point is 00:46:06 that they should have children. Arthur Conan Doyle said it was vile and villainous. Any man who knows science and medicine knows this book is muddle-headed. Any man who knows humanity knows the book is horrible. I knew James was going to do this. George Orwell... I knew he was going to knock him down.
Starting point is 00:46:21 George Orwell said it was politically naive and that it was a terrible book as well. It was a really, really... like basically a nasty piece of work. It really, really was. But as he got older in life he definitely changed and in the 20s he started to meet presidents.
Starting point is 00:46:35 He met Theodore Roosevelt. He even met Lenin as well and he started trying to talk... What was the time traveler? He started trying to talk them into a much better world and actually in the end he was probably quite influential in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Starting point is 00:46:53 that the UN came up with in 1948. So when he was really young he had all these ideas which were really quite bad but then as he got older he kind of mellowed and he had a much better idea of... I had never heard of that anticipation thing. That's extraordinary. And that would have been after he started writing novels
Starting point is 00:47:09 because I think he started about 1895. Orwell was a big fan even though there were disagreements. He was very mercurial. He had four things out with basically all of his mates in the end. But Orwell basically said that anyone who had been alive and literate
Starting point is 00:47:22 between 1900 and 1920 was affected by H.G. Wells more than anyone else. And what a brilliant guy he'd been but later in his life. So it seems like he started bad from what James said. He got extremely good and then he sort of descended into like literary shitness a little bit again.
Starting point is 00:47:36 And so Orwell said in the 1930s now he seems a bit of a shallow inadequate thinker. But mostly he was saying but look, I think he was a pretty good guy and Orwell's just replied to Orwell with a note saying, you shit. Wow. What a great writer.
Starting point is 00:47:54 Such a way with words. Jumping back to young H.G. Wells he was actually born from interesting stock. His dad was a professional cricketer who was sort of famous in his own right. So he's a cricketer who took four wickets in four balls for Kent against Sussex. Apparently the first time that's ever been done.
Starting point is 00:48:12 Wow. Yeah, so he was really cool. That by the way is huge. Yeah. It's like for me when I read that I was like, that should be the headline for that. That has only happened 43 times in the history of cricket.
Starting point is 00:48:24 And there's been over 60,000 matches of first class cricket in history. And it's only happened 43 times and he was the first one to do it. And he was the first one to do it. Wow. And one of the people that he got out was a guy called Spencer Austin Lee
Starting point is 00:48:35 who was the great nephew of Jane Austen. Wow. Amazing. So his father then ran a crockery shop which sold all of this crockery and also sold sporting goods because his great uncle was Timothy Duke and cricket fans will know the Dukes Ball
Starting point is 00:48:50 which is the cricket ball that English teams use. And whenever the Aussies come over here they always complain about the Dukes Ball. It swings too much and all that kind of stuff. So he was part of that kind of family. So they opened this shop but apparently the location was very poor and they didn't do very well.
Starting point is 00:49:06 Although today there is a pry mark there which I have to say does very well indeed. So I don't know if it was the location or not. But then I read an article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which you all know and it's often quite dry that book. But they talked about Joseph Wells who was his father and they said that
Starting point is 00:49:26 he once broke his thigh by falling from a ladder in his backyard on a Sunday morning while the rest of the family were at church. Officially he had been pruning a vine but local gossip alleged that the church service ended earlier than usual and that he was caught helping a lady friend escape over a back wall.
Starting point is 00:49:43 Oh my god. What was that about? Are you sure this wasn't a Buster Keaton film? Anna, you'll think about him writing to... Who was it? Orwell. Orwell saying you shed. He was quite good at grudges and rivalries.
Starting point is 00:49:56 So the War of the Worlds came out in I think about 1895 or 6 and obviously huge success. It was serialized as was common then. Really popular, right? It was illustrated by an artist called Warwick Goebel and Goebel's vision of the tripods was these kind of ovoid pods
Starting point is 00:50:15 standing on the metal beams and Welles hated it so much, right? He hated this illustration so much that when the first collected version of the book was released, not serialized, he added some new material and halfway through the book he's in the middle of describing a blasted planet earth
Starting point is 00:50:31 and you know, it's in the middle of a full war and he describes the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war so he's writing about a text within the fictional story. He said, the artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting machines and there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted stiff tripods
Starting point is 00:50:46 without either flexibility or subtlety with an altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these red rings had a considerable vogue and I mentioned to him simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created. Inside the next edition. So good, so good.
Starting point is 00:51:01 I think that's incredibly unprofessional. That would ruin my enjoyment of a book if suddenly the author stepped out of it to bitch about his illustration. No, I'm into that. Another thing he would have hated while we're on things that he hated would have been his great-grandson's credit in the movie.
Starting point is 00:51:18 Why? Because he didn't like credits. He didn't think credits should be part of movies. So in 1936 he wrote a movie called Things to Come and one of the things he tried to eliminate from the movie was the credits because he thinks all movies shouldn't have them. He thought instead when you were sitting watching the film
Starting point is 00:51:34 little booklets should come round and be handed out that would have the credits of the movie in them. That's a great idea. Yeah, a nice idea. No, it's not. You pause the film at various moments to check your booklet and see who the casting director was. Not during the film, I guess,
Starting point is 00:51:47 but I've often wanted some explanatory notes at the end of a film. You know what it's a bit like, which I think is a really good idea. You know, if you go to the theatre to watch a comedy show, it's like having a programme, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if I was to go and watch a podcast,
Starting point is 00:52:00 do a live show, maybe later this year, I probably would buy the programme if the film was won. It'd have to be very well written and full of interesting jokes and lots of behind-the-scenes photos. And yeah. I wouldn't buy it. Just one other thing,
Starting point is 00:52:13 just to show his influence on this movie, there was an actor in it called Ernest Thessinger, and all the scenes that he was in were shot. And then Wells decided, Matt, I don't like him. Let's get a new actor. So they reshot it with a guy called Cedric Hardwick, but they didn't tell Ernest Thessinger,
Starting point is 00:52:29 who showed up to the premiere, sat down and discovered he wasn't in the movie. That's a good prank. He should have read the little booklet even before it started. He would have known. You'd have a breakdown. You'd have some kind of psychotic break.
Starting point is 00:52:44 Yeah, you'd think you were going insane, wouldn't you? Yeah, of course. You'd think you'd invented a memory. Someone is on screen with someone else's face saying your lines to an actor you'd filmed a scene with. Yeah. Yeah, you'd end up in the asylum. Gosh.
Starting point is 00:52:55 His skin smelt of honey and ball nuts. Okay. What a great... Lovely. How do we know? One of his lovers said so, and he had many lovers. Oh, good.
Starting point is 00:53:07 We're getting to the sexy bit of A.T. Wells. This is the juice. Yeah, he was a great womanizer, and he wrote one... No, the adjective great in that usually isn't said the way that you said it. Sorry. He was an esteemed and wonderful womanizer.
Starting point is 00:53:21 There was actually a lovely Great Lives on Radio 4. It was from 2001, and it was, I don't know if you remember Humphrey Carpenter who was hosting it. Yeah, and he was interviewing Faye Weldon, the author, and she mastered about 70 at the time, and she loves A.T. Wells.
Starting point is 00:53:36 And Humphrey Carpenter said, so would you have slept with him if you'd lived at the same time? And she just said, I daresay I would. Wow. Yeah, he claimed to have an open marriage right, but it sort of sounded like he had the open marriage,
Starting point is 00:53:50 and his wife had no choice but to be in an open marriage. Well, he had a few marriages, didn't he? First was to his cousin, and second was not to his cousin, I believe. But what he said was, he wanted encounters with, I'm quoting here, free, ambitious, self-reliant women who would mate with me and go their way.
Starting point is 00:54:08 Was that in his newspaper, Adam? Exactly. Nonsmoker preferred. Can I tell you a woman that was a bit like that, his final partner in life, who was Maurer Budberg. Now, she was a Russian whose first husband was murdered in the October Revolution.
Starting point is 00:54:26 She later married Maxim Gorky, who is like the great author, and she was almost certainly a double agent between Britain and the USSR. One MI5 informant said of her, she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin. She sounds absolutely amazing,
Starting point is 00:54:42 and her older half-sister is someone called Alexandra Ignatieva Zakharovskaya, and she was the great-grandmother of a certain Nick Clegg. Oh! Whoa, that is the sexiest thing I've ever heard about Nick Clegg, which I know is not such a competition.
Starting point is 00:55:03 Yeah, she was super cool, although Virginia Woolf used to call her Bedbug, I think, nice play on her name, which was harsh, but she was like... She was everywhere, Virginia Woolf. I know, she had her things in a lot of pies. Comment on everyone? Yeah. She liked to comment, it was kind of her game.
Starting point is 00:55:19 But yeah, old Bedbug, or Maurer Budberg, she dated loads of cool people, she dated Maxim Gorky, she dated Robert Bruce Lockhart, who tried to assassinate Lenin, whilst also spying on him. He gets everywhere, and a finger in a lot of pies at John Lenin, did he?
Starting point is 00:55:35 Sorry, Anna, can you break that down for me? Robert Bruce Lockhart tried to assassinate Lenin, while also spying on him. No, sorry. Lockhart tried to assassinate Lenin, and this woman, Budberg, was totally in love with Lockhart, but also spying on him for Russia.
Starting point is 00:55:51 So, she was all over the place. She had a gold laundering scheme in the 1920s, I think, and then there was a massive house fire that destroyed all papers and files about her. How convenient. But she kept turning wells down, didn't she? I think he proposed lots of times to her.
Starting point is 00:56:07 They never married, they were a kind of life partners at the end. Because there's a theory that she was pretending to be in love with him, certainly at the start, to gain access to his large circle of friends, because if she was a Soviet double agent, she was a very useful man to know. Except that he kept falling out with all of his friends,
Starting point is 00:56:23 which must have really pissed her off. Another person Wells had an affair with was a novelist called Elizabeth von Arnim, who is very cool. She is a really great 20th century novelist. Her works are highly recommended, but he came in through a hidden entrance,
Starting point is 00:56:39 apparently, to her gaff. And they went at it so hard that they broke her hotel bed twice. Oh my God! That feels like too much information. That's from his memoirs, alright? Is it? Yeah, sorry. It's just the way you worded it, I think.
Starting point is 00:56:55 They went at it so hard. He wrote two autobiographies, one of them was clean and one of them was dirty, one of them was about his sex life. Really? And he said, hold this back until all the women involved are dead. Andy, can I ask? When they were at this hotel and they were at it so hard that they broke their bed,
Starting point is 00:57:13 did the housekeeper then come up and fix the bed while they're presumably sat around waiting for that to happen and then they started having sex again and broke it again. I don't know if it was the same night. What you're questioning is, was it a bad fix of the bed or was it separate beds?
Starting point is 00:57:29 Is the housekeeper to blame? What was his trip advice review afterwards? This book sounds amazing, though. This book of all his exploits. I think he was kind of criticised because in his first autobiography he didn't mention any of his lovers. But did it come out in his lifetime? No, he said to his son.
Starting point is 00:57:47 He gave it to his son to edit and publish, which is weird. Wow, his son could have got in there with my dad wrote a porno years before, right? He said, keep this back until all the women are dead. That meant 1984. Ironically, for someone who knew George Orwell? Yeah. And lots of it was excised.
Starting point is 00:58:05 Lots of details were excised from it. Probably, you know, bed stuff, things like that. Can I just fill the last 20 seconds with another fact? Yeah. He basically invented Warhammer. I'm saying hobby war gaming. The practice of hobby war gaming he invented.
Starting point is 00:58:21 He invented a thing in 1913 called Little Wars. It was so much more serious than modern tabletop war gaming because you had to have Okay, there are a lot of people listening who are very offended by the idea that anything is more serious than that. You had miniature cannons, which you had to fire at the enemy's soldiers in this game that H.T. Wells invented.
Starting point is 00:58:37 And this is also a man who had sex with lots of people. Yeah. Stop giving people false hope. I know. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,
Starting point is 00:58:57 we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All the previous episodes are up there. Check them out.
Starting point is 00:59:13 Also check out our tour dates. We're back on the road as of October 2021. And we're going to be playing 26 places all over the UK and Ireland. So see if we're coming to a town near you and do come along. It's going to be awesome. All right. We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.
Starting point is 00:59:37 Bye.

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